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pegasus

Aggressive Marketing

With the release of VaultWiki 2.3.0, we essentially completed VaultWiki's feature set - or at least took it as far as it can go without doing a complete rewrite. This means that we have been able to devote resources to a number of other things, like improving our revenue numbers, and making the site better as a whole.

While we developed VaultWiki, there has been little change to the layout or structure of the site. We have been 6.5 for just about that entire time. But now we've been able to make progress, renaming forums, moving threads around, adding content, improving performance, etc. But now, there's little left we can do (or would feel is worthwhile) given that vBulletin 4.x is coming out very soon, which will mean a rewrite to almost every part of the site.

So even though improving the site goes practically hand-in-hand with this, we've moved on to increasing exposure of the site. For years, this is something we didn't want to do, because we weren't confident we had enough content or a product worthy of holding on to visitors. This sentiment was fueled mainly by the fact that our own staff would forget their login information for months at a time (circa 2005).

In the past I had mentioned the Google Map Overlay, but today another tool that I discovered I really love: websiteoutlook.com

This site calculates the "value" of a web site based on its daily traffic and other Google stats like linkbacks, and not on revenues at all. It gives you an idea of an asking price for the domain (now that you've creating a "name" for it). It gives you these other numbers like pageviews like Google does, but also tells you how many (known) external links there are to your site. On top of this, it estimates how much ad revenue your site might expect to make on a daily basis.

For a site like this, which is ad-free, this is an exciting number. We spent years getting ourselves to a place where we could remove "invasive" advertising from the site completely. But in the future, should we choose to implement advertising - directly with dealing with advertisers rather than going through programs like Adwords, we can begin to form ideas about the kind of ads we can support, and how much we could reasonably charge for space.

Which brings me back to the topic, and that's what we're doing to advertise our own site and our flagship product, VaultWiki. This month, we reached out to parties we believed would have an interest in our product. In addition to that, we began creating more links back to crackedeggstudios.com on all the other sites we are members of. We updated profiles with the "home page" field. We changed our signatures to let people know who we are, and we corrected tons of existing links that pointed to our now expired .net domain.

We implemented a referral program for VaultWiki, which encourages existing customers to blog about their experience with the product, and should help word of mouth. Unfortunately, we already had some cases where this system was abused. Additional rules had to be implemented - we do not want our customers to spam other people's sites.

Hopefully our work these past few weeks will start to pay off. And hopefully vBulletin 4.x is released soon so that we can start working on these new features.

Next time, I'll discuss my adventures at the new Yankee Stadium. But I have mixed feelings about it, so getting in the mood is the problem...